Instead of #selfhosted servers it'd be nice if software was #CloudFree and #P2P
Not only should we not ve reliant kn centralized corporate hosting, we should be able to just use whatever devices we have on hand without extra server maintenance.
@mauve have you ever tried to write an application that works like this?
I can tell you from experience, it's practically impossible.
- everyone is in ipv4 NAT jail
- ipv6 when???
- if your app doesn't have a URL, who's going to use it? ( network effect of established platforms )
I agree that this is how things **should** be! But its unclear to me how to get there. Or even where to start.
IMO we have to start with self-hosting, then move to community/group hosting, then try to use those trusted community-run publicly dial-able server constellations as a pseudo-standard for how to bootstrap more P2P oriented apps. But I think it still has to load in the web browser the whole time. Any sort of publishing use case will have to be compatible w/ unmodified browser.
But hey, with the new WebTransport API, that's going to get a lot less painful soon!!
@forestjohnson I've been making p2p apps for years and have done consulting for companies that made their own. :)
P2P in web browsers is defs a nono since the browsers security model and browser vendors won't allow it any time soon.
I defs don't mean to say that people shouldn't self host, it's just that that's not where we should stop.
More unmodified browsers these days are getting support for loading sites from IPFS for example.
For NAT stuff holepunch.to and socketsupply.co are good.